Excerpt: Steven Soderbergh’s (supposed) swan song as a feature film director is less a Contagion-like topical thriller about the dangers of pharmaceuticals than it is a crisp but low-voltage neo-noir where drugs are only part of the story.

Excerpt: One can see that Soderbergh and Burns were trying to make a statement about Big Pharma and the American Healthcare system within the structure of a thriller genre, but their insistence on building upon one ‘shocking’ revelation after the next becomes ludicrous quickly

Excerpt: For the most part, the film serves as the Soderbergh’s tribute to his own eclecticism. Much as Soderbergh delighted in his chameleonic ability to shift between genres from project to project, in Side Effects he accomplishes the same trick in a film already in progress.

Excerpt: So, if you don’t mind a film going down one alley and then turning down another alley, only to pull your chain, then “Side Effects” will have a disorienting but satisfying effect. Manipulation never tasted so delicious.

Excerpt: It’s a credit to the nutty, crackpot ambition of ‘Side Effects’ that it somehow covers a whole handful of regular Soderbergh bases, cramming together a narrative that involves sickness, financial distress, psychological penetration, and blood-and-lust-stained greed.

Excerpt: Burns’ script is a very traditional wronged-man-style murder mystery in the way the story is set up, exposed, and debunked. Yet, Soderbergh–who also shot and edited the film under his usual pseudonyms–carves out the movie with a clinical precision, using the same kind of bare approach that made Contagion so different from the disaster movies that came prior.

Excerpt: What makes Side Effects intriguing is not the fine contours of its double and triple cross-packed plot, but the ways in which Soderbergh and Burns upend expectations regarding how such thrillers are typically presented.